We are evaluating OAS as a data collector and SCADA system. I am looking at some feedback from those who have used it. I knew if anyone would have experience with it, it would be the folks at this website.

Any users out there? What year/s did you use it and what did you think?

I liked the software and it's capabilities, especially the data acquisition.

If I was looking at using this for a plant site I would have loved to try this out. The use of non-proprietary programming methods seems to be a smart way to go. However since we are building equipment that goes into existing sites, the choice of software is highly influenced by what our customers already have installed.

I have been looking into OAS for several weeks now and unless any red flags pop up we will be purchasing a number of 'Flex Tags' from them shortly for a few upcoming projects.

As we are familiar with C#/WPF in Visual Studio and data from an SQL Express database, everything OAS does just makes sense. The tools available that drop into Visual Studio seem to work with very little actual programming needed and give pretty good visuals to work with an already widely accepted WPF format. Web programming and mobile programming through Xamarin looks to be fairly straight forward as well. Within a few minutes of testing, I had dropped objects such as alarming, trending, buttons, radial graphs, and tonnes of other things into a basic WPF window and connected with my PLC using their tag database/driver configuration. I like the fine control details you can do very simply for alarming, user security, database logging etc. Besides the price, I have yet to run into anything I haven't been impressed with.

I demoed the software for 2 months. The support people were helpful and had no problems hosting a gotomeeting to show me how the software works. Also answered all my questions and explained until I understood.

Very nice software offering except for one thing that I couldn’t get over.
Everything the software does can also be done for “free”. AdvancedHMI does most of what OAS does and it’s free. Oh but it logs to SQL out of the box and AdvancedHMI doesn’t. Big deal. With a few lines of code, that is easily done.

OAS does have a nicer alarm handler, and does support WPF and web. Eeh...big deal.
Those things weren’t worth it to me.

Overall, it’s a nice out of the box product with good support.

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“Did the Lord say that machines outta take the place of livin’, and what’s the substitute for bread and beans? Do engines get rewarded for their steam?” -John Henry